The crowd demonstrating outside the Massachusetts Department of Education offices on Pleasant Street was energized. A speaker led the protesters in chants between squawks from his megaphone; they waved signs and placards denouncing tyrannical government overreach. One read “Free the children!” Another, held by a an 11-year-old girl brought to the picket-line by her activist mother, read “My body, my choice!”
I had seen these slogans many times before, at demonstrations for reproductive justice, protests against the detention of migrant children, and at the Women’s March in January 2017. Like the chants of “Tell me what democracy looks like!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” they have become the familiar, instantly-recognizable material of dissent over the last four years, the memes that defined the progressive resistance to Trump’s America.
Yet, in this case, some six months after the former president retired to his Mar-a-Lago stronghold, the demonstrators came not from the left, but from the right. The object of the protesters’ wrath was the state’s recent announcement that it would not lift its COVID-19 mitigation policies before the end of the summer.
It should be shocking, even comical, but it isn’t. Rather, the capacity of the Magaist movement and its leaders to reconfigure and weaponize the slogans and rhetoric of its opponents on the left is one of its greatest strengths. It the movement’s semiotic superpower that blunts our rhetorical challenges and leaves us vulnerable to their assaults. And, if recent history is any indication, they are very good at it.
Take “fake news.” The phrase appeared exactly four times in the pages of the New York Times in the decade leading up to the 2016 election, and then only in reference to the comic political commentary served up by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Suddenly, in the spring of 2016, “fake news” took on a new meaning and urgency. The Times reported on “Russia’s ‘troll’ army” as the primaries wrapped up that spring. Then, two days before the presidential election, media columnist Jim Rutenberg, citing alt-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich as the worst example of the problem, noted the “host of faux-journalistic players [who] pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.”
Fake news was something that Magaist demagogues and their surrogates in the right-wing media did. Shortly after President Trump’s surprising victory, the New York Times editorial board lamented “the digital virus called fake news.” The newspaper noted that the problem extended from the “liars and con artists” eager to make a quick buck to otherwise-respectable public figures like Senator Ben Sasse, and that “the vast majority of them take far-right positions.”
The Times laid blame almost on the President-elect’s doorstep: “A man who wrote a number of false news reports told The Washington Post that Trump supporters and campaign officials often shared his false anti-Clinton posts without bothering to confirm the facts and that he believes his work may have helped elect the Republican nominee.”
However, something extraordinary happened. In February 2017, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump officially declared war on journalism when he tweeted “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” From that point onward he owned the phrase, wielding it as a cudgel against not only his critics in the media, but against any journalist or news organization that did not show sufficient deference.
In retrospect, it is amazing how quickly and deftly President Trump accomplished this détournement. Before long, the phrase “fake news” had begun to appear in social and news media reserved almost exclusively for professional journalism. A Harvard-Harris poll released at the end of May 2017 found that almost two-thirds of Americans believed that “a lot of fake news appears in the mainstream media.” In the Columbia Journalism Review, Jonathan Peters reported that the president’s supporters were flooding the Federal Communications Commission with “fake news” complaints against journalists and media outlets.
By the time a mob of Magaist insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the equation of “fake news” with professional journalism, President Trump’s Democratic Party opponents, and the mythic “radical left” of right-wing fantasies had become complete. The president used the phrases “fake news” six times and “radical left” three times in the 25-minute speech he gave to incite the insurrection. In the minds of the self-styled patriots who sacked the seat of American democracy, there was no ambiguity.
Significantly, professional journalists and news organizations seem to agree. They have almost completely ceded control of the meaning of “fake news” to the very people against whom they had initially deployed the phrase. Organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been on the defensive ever since CNN had to walk-back part of a report about Donald Trump Jr. receiving emails from Wikileaks that was, if not exactly “fake news,” certainly shoddy reporting.
The problem is that the eagerness with which news organizations deployed the phrase in legitimate reporting on the political propaganda and misinformation campaigns of the 2016 election legitimized the accusation of “fake news;” it gave it a reality and some value of truth. Perversely, however, the Magaist movement and its leaders – who are not overly concerned with such niceties – have been able to deploy that legitimacy, if not truth, in their attacks on journalism. It legitimizes the lie that professional journalism is “fake news” while maintaining that the brazenly-partisan prevarications of media demagogues like Tucker Carlson are not.
This has happened before. We have seen this happen with such frequency that it would make poor Winston Smith’s eyes spin at his desk in George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. The only thing remarkable about the trajectory of “fake news’” is how quickly it was détourned from legitimate critical category to Magaist libel.
One of the most striking examples of this transformation can be found in the career of “freedom of religion” and its associated slogan “religious liberty” over the last few decades. Fifty years ago, the term was synonymous with ecumenism and religious toleration. In Roman Catholicism and Religious Liberty, a study published for the World Council of Churches around the time of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) the sociologist A.F. Carrillo de Albornoz congratulated Rome for moving “toward greater tolerance of other churches.”
As late as the 1980s, the phrase “freedom of religion” had a fairly specific meaning. In 1986, alarmed by the growing influence of Evangelical Christianity in the Reagan administration’s policies, Howard Squadron warned an American Jewish community conference of a “wholesale attack on church-state separation” that imperiled freedom of religion. In its “Mini Page” education section, the Washington Post informed young readers in 1991 that “you are free to hold any religious belief you want to, but there are times when the government can put limits on what you do or how you practice your beliefs.” The lesson was so important that the Post reprinted the feature twelve years later.
It made sense; it was not merely a foundational principle of a tolerant, secular society, it was the law. Arrested in the negligent death of her daughter from bacterial meningitis while she prayed alongside a faith healer, Laurie Walker petitioned to have the charges dropped, claiming “freedom of religion.” The California Supreme Court was having none of that, and unanimously denied her petition in 1986, a decision confirmed when the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Walker’s appeal.
At the heart of the decision was the principle that personal religious beliefs do not absolve a citizen of their legal and social responsibilities. This point had already been made abundantly clear in 1983, when the Supreme Court ruled that Bob Jones University, a Christian college in South Carolina, could not claim protection under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment for its racist policies. Religion is a private matter in a secular society, and it is not the place of government either to discipline faith, or to promote or protect it when it comes into conflict with social obligations and public life.
Walker was convicted of manslaughter in 1990.
It was settled law by then. Even the American Civil Liberties Union declined to defend Philadelphia’s Faith Tabernacle Congregation in its appeal of a court order to vaccinate four children for the measles at its church school in 1991. But the Christian right, still stinging from the Supreme Court’s rebuke of its religiously-sanctioned racism in Bob Jones v. The United States, had begun to mobilize in an effort to redefine freedom of religion as its opposite.
Their first success came when reputedly liberal Democrats like Senators Chuck Schumer and Edward Kennedy jumped on the conservative bandwagon to push for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Ostensibly meant to protect the rights of Indigenous Americans who had been convicted of a narcotics offense in 1990 for using peyote in a religious ceremony, the rhetoric surrounding the law’s passage make it fairly clear that the real point was to appease the increasingly militant Christian right. The legislation helped establish a legal regime that places faith over law, and the private over the public, turning “freedom of religion” on its head.
America is becoming “entirely too secular,” President Bill Clinton said at a White House prayer breakfast where he trumpeted his support for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, then before Congress. “The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn’t mean we need to try to have freedom from religion,” he told his audience in his honeyed Arkansas drawl, sidling up to the Christian right.
Looking back, it’s almost touching how President Clinton and his congressional allies believed that they could win over America’s burgeoning Christian nationalist movement. The president really did see himself as a great unifier who could bring together political factions divided by minor differences of economic policy and woo conservatives by performing a Christian piety even deeper than that of their hero Ronald Reagan.
But Christian nationalists were not – and are not – interested in unity, only in the power and the glory. Mobilized by Bob Jones, and with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a legal foundation, they rolled back a century of liberal secularism. In 1996, a federal court threw out Walker’s conviction and, inspired by post-9-11 Islamophobia and the crusade in the Middle East lead by President George W. Bush who, after all, is one of their own, the Christian nationalist Church Militant girded for battle.
I remember naively celebrating the Supreme Court’s Obergefell vs. Hodges decision in 2015, believing that the culture war was finally over, and “the good guys one.” What few of us really understood was that the “bad guys” were already fighting a different war. While we celebrated the expansion of meaning that would embrace hitherto disenfranchised fellow citizens in a new regime of rights and legal recognition, the culture warriors of the right had no such scruples. Allied with and reinforced by a roiling mass movement of white rage disenchanted by the economic crisis of the Great Recession and intensified by abject existential terror of the eclipse of white demographic power, they outflanked the left and mounted an assault on meaning itself.
If the courts could redefine “marriage” to include same-sex couples, they reasoned, then they could simply redefine foundational principles like “freedom of religion” to mean the freedom to abdicate from social and legal obligations on the basis of faith. So, a country clerk in Kentucky could refuse to do her job, and a for-profit company could decline to obey the law of the land simply by claiming “freedom of religion.” Thus empowered, these latter-day crusaders can now dream of imposing their own version of Christianity on the country in the name of “freedom of religion.”
As much as they might rail against postmodernity and demand a return to a word of imagined “absolute truths,” where men are in charge, where the white race is dominant, where marriage is “between one man and one woman,” and it’s “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” they have absorbed at least one postmodern lesson: meaning is fluid. It is what you make it. “Freedom of religion” is thus whatever they say it is.
It only took the cynical opportunism of then-Republican nominee Donald Trump to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Although he did not create it, the former president benefited from the movement of white, Christian rage, helped to direct it and gave it shape. Most importantly, he provided an object lesson in nihilism – anything can be anything if you don’t actually believe in anything. This was, after all, the leader who wanted to cure COVID-19 with bleach and shining lights, and who maintained “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”
In the fall of 2016, then-Republican nominee Trump’s nihilistic vacuousness was a source both of wonder and some comfort to professional journalists, and the millions of Americans who prepared to vote for another candidate. “Except for a blitzkrieg grab for power,” Jack Shafer wrote in Politico the Saturday before the presidential election, “Trump doesn’t stand for anything, and that may prove his downfall.” It was precisely because of this that, Frank Bruni had written in the New York Times a little over a week before, that Hillary Clinton was “in a position to notch a resounding victory by historical standards.” On 5 November, Bruni imagined a bleak future in the event of Trump’s “unlikely” victory, and even in his more-likely defeat. “But I’m not terrified that he’ll win, because I’m stubbornly confident that Americans aren’t that far gone.”
The Republican nominee had no policies, no ideas, no philosophy apart from a red-faced resentment, but that was hardly, as Shafer naively proposed, his downfall; it was his strength. Despite Bruni’s sunny confidence, it turned out that a great many Americans – almost 63 million of them – were, in fact, “that far gone,” and they saw in their new president the apocalyptic instrument of their own nihilistic rage.
Relieved of the burden of meaning, the Magaist movement can will itself to power without wasting time on policies or ideas. This is a movement that serves no higher goal than itself. Thus, the violent insurrection on 6 January 2021 can simultaneously be characterized as a “normal tourist visit” and an Antifa false-flag operation, while the crazed Magaist hooligans are celebrated for heroically defending the Constitution. And the inconvenience of taking simple, commonsense measures to halt the spread of a deadly pandemic is framed as an act of genocide.
This goes well beyond any superficial comparison to the Nazi große Lüge – tell a lie loudly enough and often enough, and it will become “the truth” – to something even more sinister. There is no plan, clever strategy, philosophy, or idea at the heart of Magaism, there is only a dark void of meaning.
Magaism’s semiotic nihilism undermines any rational basis for political debate, inoculating it from the burden of having to justify itself and immunizing it from its many internal contradictions. Magaists don’t have to make a case for themselves; they are confident that anything their critics say will just bounce of them and stick to their enemies. But that isn’t the worst of it; by reconfiguring the slogans of the left, Magaism aspires to evacuate our political rhetoric and analytical categories of any meaning, perpetually placing us on the defensive, and neutralizing our critiques. Thus, “Black lives matter” becomes “all lives matter,” “freedom of religion” becomes Christian supremacy, “my body, my choice” justifies spreading a deadly pathogen, and the social contract is tyranny.
It leaves us standing impotent, expecting politics to make rational sense, and words to have meaning. In an age of slogans and social media politics, where the misinformation spewed by a dozen people can condemn billions to an endless pandemic, where elections can be swung by memes, it effectively silences our resistance to the rising totalitarian tide, and that should terrify us. Those placards, held so un-selfconsciously by Magaist protesters on Pleasant Street carry a menacing message: Their side is winning.